Galliano

It’s hard to tell if it was an idea, or did it just happen…?

It is true that Dr Matthew Herbert bears some responsibility; being the one who texted for the band to play at his friend Anns birthday. There’s always a spark, but there must have been some inkling? or coincidence? …or some such that had made the two ends of a piece of string ready to tie again. Maybe it was the idea of a palimpsest. ‘A manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed’.

It’s reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. Maybe it was the thought of the poet Mary Ruefle, getting up every morning to work on her ‘Erasure’ series, making something new and beautiful out of what is already there.

The art of seeing new forms within the form already present. In a way it’s no different to what The Galliano project was at the start. It was about sampling, and using what were then, specific records as reference points from a specific set of clubs. To that extent ‘Nothing has changed’. The new music comes from the same source. Namely the rhythms played by Gilles in his club sets and radio show, with Gallagher accompanying him for decades into the dark of clubland, armed with poetry, chants, and a variety of odd noises. There will be a different energy obviously, you vibrate at a different voltage aged 50 than at 20.

Although, this is exactly what musicians found interesting; – to go back to the material, as how you now play has changed with experience. What we do know I suppose is Galliano was a dance band. At its heart it was, and still is, about making the body move. Beckett believed that physical movement conveys at least as much as words. In these times, more than ever, the togetherness of the dance floor seems to be calling. Maybe there are just more seductive ways to play with time in the musical world and all its entanglements. Deliberate and often with Galliano, accidental.

They were part of a momentum that tried to build on what the 80s had given, using early 70s cosmic styles in the 90s. These fused with the contemporary energies on the dance floor – and it all morphed into its own crazy time and moment. So maybe because of all the above, or maybe none … something has made it time to play with it all again. Together with new material after having been into the great Ernesto’s studio; – it should be enough to spin the Galliano cosmic wheel again. Hold on to your berets and earth boots, here we go again. Bless the funk.

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